Takashi Murakami

Two big pieces of Takashi Murakami at the Gagosian Gallery in Rome

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Four huge eyes look at as through voluptuous clouds. We're at the Gagosian Gallery in Rome at the first Takashi Murakami monographic exhibition in Italy, open from November 13th to January 15th, 2011. The big eyes belong to equally impressive twisted dragons, painted on eighteen meter of panels. The first feeling you get is that of being besieged by fierce claws and scales, of being hunted by two menacing monsters.

In fact Murakami, known for being able to mix with humor and lightness the world of manga with the tradition of Japanese painting, for this exhibition is inspired by those that in the East are considered symbols of good luck and optimism: the mythological dragons Unryūzu ("the dragon that dazzles in eight directions"). Murakami mixes these symbols with the imagery of the popular video game Blue Dragon, thus building a bridge between tradition and the present.

The two paintings on display, Dragon in Clouds - Red Mutation and Dragon in Clouds - Indigo Blue, dominated, as it is clear from the title, by the colors red and blue, are portrayed by Murakami with his characteristic "superflat" style that mixes the sophisticated techniques of traditional Japanese painting with representations of pop, manga and otaku.

The premise of the exhibition, that the artist himself, of course, takes care of, reveals how he is fond of tradition: "The combination of red and blue with a creature that has long been considered a symbol of the everyone's fate is my attempt to confirm my devotion to art: the creation of these paintings has been as a votive offering".

In addition to quoting the distinguished Japanese artistic tradition, Murakami increases the density of the two works, quoting the novel by Thomas Harris, Red Dragon which was inspired by the series of watercolors Great Red Dragon by William Blake.

With this dizzying mix of the distant past and more recent art history - all seen with an eye to the imagery of video games - Murakami has been confirmed as one of the artists that best expresses our current times, convulsive and omnivorous.